Museu del Disseny de Barcelona

The Museu del Disseny de Barcelona occupies a striking angular building at Placa de les Glories, nicknamed 'the Lipstick' for its cantilevered form, and designed by MBM Arquitectes as a landmark of contemporary Barcelona architecture. Inside, the museum consolidates four formerly separate collections covering decorative arts, ceramics, textiles and fashion, and graphic design, tracing Catalan design history from medieval ceramics through to contemporary product and graphic design. Highlights include historic fashion garments spanning several centuries, an extensive collection of Catalan and Spanish ceramics, and rotating exhibitions on contemporary graphic and industrial design that keep the permanent collection feeling current. A visit typically takes one and a half to two hours, enough time to walk through the permanent galleries and one temporary exhibition. The building's open, top-lit interior and cantilevered upper floors are themselves worth photographing, both from the plaza outside and from the museum's interior staircases looking up through the atrium. Weekday afternoons are the quietest time to visit, since the museum draws fewer tour groups than Barcelona's larger art institutions; Thursday evenings, when the museum stays open until 9pm, offer an alternative to daytime visits with a calmer atmosphere. The museum sits at Placa de les Glories, a major traffic and metro interchange undergoing long-term redevelopment into a green plaza, so the surrounding area can feel like a building site, though the museum interior itself is unaffected. The textile and ceramic galleries in particular reward visitors with an interest in craftsmanship and design history rather than fine art, distinguishing the museum from Barcelona's painting-focused institutions like MNAC or the Picasso Museum.